Luisa Zissman has weighed in on the debate around airbrushing children’s school photos, admitting she’s had no qualms in editing her own kids’ pictures in the past.
Speaking on Wednesday’s Good Morning Britain, the former Apprentice candidate finalist revealed that while she’s yet to photoshop a school photo she has “had family ones done” where she’s “smoothed the skin” of her children or edited out stains “if there’s a bit of ketchup”.
“They’re not so lovely when they’re covered in crumbs of food,” Luisa said of her three children. “Two of them are ginger, so they have that fair skin that gets all red and blotchy, and I think it’s nice to look a bit smoother. And not look back and think, ‘Oh, my poor face!’.”
However, she said she drew the line at airbrushing out their freckles.
Luisa joked: “When it’s on the wall I like it to look nice, I’ve got a very nice house. I want them to fit the brand of the house. They don’t know, they just think they’re beautiful always, photoshop or not.
“I wouldn’t photoshop out a scar, or something like that because I wouldn’t want them to be ashamed of anything like that, but for me, there’s a line. Anything that was permanent, I wouldn’t photoshop.
“I wouldn’t make them thinner, I wouldn’t make their eyes bigger, I wouldn’t do anything like that… I don’t think I’d whiten their teeth.”
“I do think there’s a line to it, but for a school photo that you look back on, I think girls especially – and I’m really conscious raising three girls – sometimes a little ego boost, sometimes it’s OK not to like things about yourself,” she added.
Journalist Dawn O’Porter was in staunch disagreement with Luisa, describing bad school photos as a “rite of passage”.
She said: “I love laughing about mine. They’re so cheesy, they’re so blotchy, they’re so terrible.
“I would just be worried about that future conversation of, ‘didn’t you think I was good enough? I was a child and you didn’t think I was cute’. Let’s not instil that feeling.”
The debate came about as a result of a school in Phoenix, Arizona, which one mother was furious to discover was offering “retouching” for class pictures of eight-year-old students.
“What 8 yr old needs to be paranoid about an ‘uneven skin tone’?” she wrote on Twitter earlier this week, adding that she’d also made a complaint to the school.
Good Morning Britain airs every weekday from 6am on ITV.